8 ms·

Why We Hire Great Developers, Not Great Mobile Developers

67 points by astigsen 11y ago

sridharpoduri 11y ago
I think this is mostly true for all successful companies, not just startups. You are looking to hire for the company and not for a particular position. Hire for talent and let them grow with the product/domain/technology.
- pconno3 11y ago
  I strong agree with this. It's important to hire people who are excited about the company and the environment. This will inspire them to learn/grow.
pjmlp 11y ago
Nice article. As someone that occasional does some hobby Android and WP coding, when time allows, it is quite interesting to see this type of attitude. Here in Germany many IT companies seem to disregard skills if they aren't listed as part of the previous job. Regards of what one would be able to show at the interview, if HR didn't filter out the CV. So no chance of switching tech stacks unless one is able to land in a greenfield project that is taking off, inside the same company, before doing the jump.
- V-2 11y ago
  That's not just Germany, it's typical. It reminds me of http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/1847 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/1847 :)
  - lohengramm 11y ago
    That's perfect. Definitely not a Germany thing.
    - alkonaut 11y ago
      Wow, so there are situations where a bad programmer with the right CV keywords would be chosen over a good programmer with the wrong keywords on the CV? I thought we were past that now.
      - userulluipeste 11y ago
        Worse than that is when a developer has side projects that may show real expertise that was not required nor used in the previous jobs. Considering only the skills endorsed by previous jobs when doing a hire is a sure way of handicapping your company!
        pjmlp 11y ago
        That is what prompted my comment. Once an HR drone has explicitly told me that my side projects had zero value for the application, even though they matched what was being searched for.
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        All the time, specially in the consulting world for Fortune 500.
        alkonaut 11y ago
        I can see how it happens at the largest corporations, because they have staff to filter applications they don't understand, or let recruiters do the same work. Hopefully this is a dying practice.
- k__ 11y ago
  So true. On the other hand, if you know PHP, JavaScript or Java, you're pretty safe.
smt88 11y ago
When I saw this, I thought it was going in a different direction. I personally despise mobile development because so little of it is elegant writing of code. A lot of it has to do with learning the bizarre ins and outs of thoroughly fragmented targets, as well as documentation that's sometimes very lacking. I had assumed any developer who really loves coding (rather than debugging or trial-and-error) would avoid mobile development, leaving the talent pool very lacking.
- joakleaf 11y ago
  Personally, I am on iOS, and while iOS has gone through a number of, occasionally frustrating, framework changes, it has never felt particularly fragmented. My impression is also, that it has changed a lot on Android. Personally, I also think that, in the beginning, many parts of iOS-development felt more modern than OSX, and that this was the platform where things were maturing faster. I would say, that mobile development is like development on most other platforms these days. You have an increasingly larger choice of languages, and the Mobile CPUs are certainly powerful enough that you can build very complex apps, where elegant code is an advantage. The challenge is to keep things simple from a user perspective. It really is (still) a wonderful domain to develop in, and I doubt there is more debugging or trial-and-error than any other platform! I worked for a company that embedded Linux on a custom device about 15 years ago. That was a horrible debugging, trial-and-error experience. The language was C. Chosen as a compromise because of the hardware specs, but not an obvious choice for the applications we built. Certainly not today. Most of the development team was frustrated with the development process, and I actually left the company before the product was put in production. So I think, I understand your line of thought, but I don't recognize it in today's mobile development.
- dozzie 11y ago
  Also, most of mobile development seems to be writing another UI for sensors or SQLite database, or sometimes another game like the plenty out there. Why would anybody think of that as exciting?
  - V-2 11y ago
    Like your typical web app isn't yet another CRUD or CMS ;)
scottishfiction 11y ago
Totally agree with the approach. Relevant - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing... Although perhaps 'Smart and Gets Things Done' is an over-simplification.
- simi_ 11y ago
  You might like this http://steve-yegge.blogspot.de/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-smart.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.de/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-...
Mapiarz 11y ago
What I have noticed in the first paragraph: "It seems that some schools have caught on and are teaching students the ins and outs of being a mobile developer but for the most part graduates seem to only have a course or two of mobile dev under their belt." Am I the only one who finds that weird? During my 5 years of college education in "informatics" I never had a 'programming for..." course. We were taught how to tackle problems, algorithmics, patterns and practices, formal languages, ai, distributed mechanisms and so on. We had to get that hard concrete experience on our own. IMHO having courses like "programming for Android" or "Web/JS programming" is a great way to mass produce monkey programmers.
- rhinoceraptor 11y ago
  > IMHO having courses like ... is a great way to mass produce monkey programmers. Definitely, I took a RoR elective and I wish there had been a Lisp/FP elective I could have taken. I'm pretty sure I only had one class where first class functions were even mentioned.
- djent 11y ago
  Worse yet, my college is offering a Mobile App Development class, under Computer Information Systems (as opposed to Computer Science, which I am in) which uses App Inventor. And they're charging $240 per credit for this 4 credit class!
- alistairSH 11y ago
  Totally agree with the "mass-produced monkey programmer" comment. I've seen it in practice, when interviewing new graduates. The grads from good (not necessarily great) schools tend to have solid fundamentals, and even without lots of "buzzword" coursework, they come out better. The grads from mediocre schools often have more buzzwords on their resume, but often lack solid fundamentals. Of course, that isn't written in stone. We have several great new hires from schools that are typical regional universities.
  - mattmanser 11y ago
    The graduates from schools with higher entrance requirements have better graduates than the schools with lower ones? And you think it's their course material...
lordnacho 11y ago
Makes total sense. Once you've figured out how coding works, you can do any stack, any framework, any language. It bothers me how job ads tend to focus on various buzzwords. I'm quite sure you're better off hiring someone with good fundamentals who can learn your stack, rather than someone who is a novice but has some experience in the stack. I started off doing financial trading code in c++ / c#. It wasn't a huge leap doing Android and iOS. Principles are the same: - Some kind of OO. They are all pretty similar for most purposes. C++ is maybe a bit more intricate. Similarly, some kind of functional/lambda. - Some way to access a database. Plenty of ORMs or ways to do SQL if you need that. - Some GUI organisational principles. WinForms, WPF, Qt, Android, iOS, whatever. They tend to have things like "only draw on the main thread" and a pile of APIs for organising the screens, buttons, and so forth. But if you've done one, you're not going to need a course to do another. - StackOverflow will tell you everything that's pure translation. Things like {} dicts for python. - Get a brief tutorial for each new language/framework. They're all over the web, and the main point it just to highlight the features.
- chrisseaton 11y ago
  If you're hiring someone to do something like implement a new machine learning algorithm or a new compiler optimisation they're not to just pick that stuff up off of stack overflow are they? Sometimes you need specialist knowledge.
  - workitout 11y ago
    If it's a new concept then the entropy is huge for anyone regardless of background.
    - chrisseaton 11y ago
      Do you really think any random programmer can master any given field of computer science in just a few months of starting a job? You could take a compiler engineer and get them doing cryptography, or a cryptographer and get them to write a compiler? No need for any experience to work in either of those fields? Just some JS or Android experience would be fine and you can use Stack Overflow to work out the rest of the details?
coldcode 11y ago
As long as someone understands the platform you can do this. I've seen way too much iOS code written by smart people new to iOS with no clue how to structure and ship a successful mobile app. This is likely true for most platforms. A smart developer can learn in time but usually you don't get that time so it's better if at least someone has done whatever it is before. I am sure I could master Android in time but if I started building an app on day 1 it would likely be terrible.
- alistairSH 11y ago
  The article addresses this. They have experienced developers on-hand to assist and ensure standards are maintained. Getting the time to learn is a management problem, not a developer problem. I've taught C# and the .Net framework to several teams over the last two years. The good developers pick it up without much problem. But, we usually start with several sprints of co-located group programming (for complete teams learning the stack).
  - pconno3 11y ago
    Agreed, it's important to that the entire teams understands when someone is learning a new skill set or language. We try to allocate more time in our sprint for not only the developer who is learning but also for another developer on the team to help ramp them up. It takes a bit of working with the PM to determine what is a good task that isn't super time sensitive but it's typically a solvable problem.
seivan 11y ago
Mobile Devs might be better versed in the UI layer as they would be more familiar. Could end up not having to need a "photoshop-designer". We've used good developers on iOS projects, and while they would do ok with actual logic, they didn't do well when it came to Core Data or UIKit. It's not an education problem, but an interest issues. Most of them used Androids, the ones with iOS devices really didn't care much about UI. But I kinda agree with this in other aspects.
- pconno3 11y ago
  That's a valid point. Although, we hire developers who are interested in becoming mobile developers. If you want to succeed as an iOS developer, Core Data and UIKit are essential to learn. If the person isn't interested in doing the front end then mobile dev probably isn't for them. That should come up in the interview process.
JamesBaxter 11y ago
What I can't seem to teach my project manager is that the App Store review process takes as long as it takes and other app store restrictions.
koder2016 11y ago
It was a bit surreal to read, until I realised there are devs out there who never wrote any non-web front ends. > ...you’ll quickly learn that if you run all your DB queries on the main thread... When he says "mobile" he means "front-end". Front-end doesn't mean "HTML and JS".
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
jmbrook 11y ago
Small nit pick, but I would be worried about a mobile development place that thinks it has only been around 8 years, not heard of J2ME, Symbian and Windows CE etc? I do agree with the idea of hiring decent engineers and just training them, my only concern would be that without having had the mobile experience they might not know that they don't like it - it can be quite painful getting code to work nicely on a large collection of different hardware.
- potatolicious 11y ago
  That is a pretty small nitpick you've got there ;) It's a bit like saying "don't they know human flight existed before the Wright Bros." or "don't they know cars predate the Model T?" Of course, but the iPhone (and subsequently Android) presented a gigantic turning point in mobile development, to such a degree that mobile development can largely be categorized into "pre-iPhone" and "post-iPhone". Pre-iPhone mobile development was a vanishing small industry compared to today and used technologies that are largely completely not around today (see: J2ME, Symbian, Windows CE). So yeah, maybe they could've said "mobile development in the modern context centered around multitouch-centric interfaces using soft keyboards has only been around 8 years", but that's kind of a mouthful, and unless we're trying to write an accurate history of mobile software, not particularly relevant to anything.
  - jmbrook 11y ago
    I would agree with the pre/post iPhone shift - but the likes of EA/Glu and other major games companies shifted an awful lot of apps pre iPhone. The big shift is that touch became the only game in town (along with all the associated dev wrinkles). Also the demise of all content aggregators meant we could just upload our apps to a store and keep 70% (prior to this we got ~20% i.e. operator took 60-70%, aggregator took 30% and we got 50/50 on that).
  - jmbrook 11y ago
    I think a more accurate example is it like saying: "don't they know cars predate the Tesla" and given it is electric all prior cars don't matter. Just showing my age really :^)
rumcajz 11y ago
On the other hand, programmers jumping from one industry to another build no domain knowledge. The result is that domain experts, such as accountants or telecom technicians, specify the requirements, which then get translated 1:1 to software design, no diligence applied. The result is shitty software.
EvanPlaice 11y ago
How can I find a place like this to work. It seems like everybody sharing their interview experiences says they all use the same Google-wannabe standard. Ie whiteboarding, implementing an advanced data structure from memory, and rapidly solving CompSci homework questions. I'm no CompSci grad but I have pretty a pretty experience in many languages/stacks. I have confidence that I could design and implement a reasonably complex distributed architecture if requirements called for one. Yet I'd look like a complete asshole if asked to whiteboard a R/B tree from memory.
- gedrap 11y ago
  Fair enough. In my experience, "no one was ever fired for buying ibm" kind of thing is very strong in the interviewing. Why are you asking these meaningless questions, that don't give a chance to demonstrate any relevant knowledge? Everyone does that, duh.
  - EvanPlaice 11y ago
    It's kind of sad that a person's worth can be reduced to such a useless metric. HR has no ability to objectively judge technical talent, so they follow the latest 'flavor of the month' interviewing strategy. The suits are heavily influenced by sources like Business Insider that repeatedly parrot advice about avoiding 'false positives at all cost.' Meanwhile the tech specialists who should step in and call BS, won't because they're to arrogant to admit their own hindsight bias. Ala judging new candidates based on their current level of ability and specialized knowledge rather than the level they were at when they were initially hired. It seems like the industry is dead set on forcing the perception that software development is hard science -- as in -- everything can and should be described in terms of fundamental data structures and algorithms. When the reality is, software development is 95% art and about 5% hard science. The vast majority of clever algorithms and data structures can be implemented in less than 100 lines of code each. What accounts for the other millions of lines of code in a system such as the Linux kernel? The world will never know...

67 points by astigsen 11y ago

I think this is mostly true for all successful companies, not just startups. You are looking to hire for the company and not for a particular position. Hire for talent and let them grow with the product/domain/technology.

pconno3 11y ago
I strong agree with this. It's important to hire people who are excited about the company and the environment. This will inspire them to learn/grow.

pjmlp 11y ago

Nice article. As someone that occasional does some hobby Android and WP coding, when time allows, it is quite interesting to see this type of attitude. Here in Germany many IT companies seem to disregard skills if they aren't listed as part of the previous job. Regards of what one would be able to show at the interview, if HR didn't filter out the CV. So no chance of switching tech stacks unless one is able to land in a greenfield project that is taking off, inside the same company, before doing the jump.

V-2 11y ago
That's not just Germany, it's typical. It reminds me of http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/1847 http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/1847 :)
- lohengramm 11y ago
  That's perfect. Definitely not a Germany thing.
  - alkonaut 11y ago
    Wow, so there are situations where a bad programmer with the right CV keywords would be chosen over a good programmer with the wrong keywords on the CV? I thought we were past that now.
    - userulluipeste 11y ago
      Worse than that is when a developer has side projects that may show real expertise that was not required nor used in the previous jobs. Considering only the skills endorsed by previous jobs when doing a hire is a sure way of handicapping your company!
      - pjmlp 11y ago
        That is what prompted my comment. Once an HR drone has explicitly told me that my side projects had zero value for the application, even though they matched what was being searched for.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      All the time, specially in the consulting world for Fortune 500.
      - alkonaut 11y ago
        I can see how it happens at the largest corporations, because they have staff to filter applications they don't understand, or let recruiters do the same work. Hopefully this is a dying practice.
k__ 11y ago
So true. On the other hand, if you know PHP, JavaScript or Java, you're pretty safe.

smt88 11y ago

When I saw this, I thought it was going in a different direction. I personally despise mobile development because so little of it is elegant writing of code. A lot of it has to do with learning the bizarre ins and outs of thoroughly fragmented targets, as well as documentation that's sometimes very lacking. I had assumed any developer who really loves coding (rather than debugging or trial-and-error) would avoid mobile development, leaving the talent pool very lacking.

joakleaf 11y ago
Personally, I am on iOS, and while iOS has gone through a number of, occasionally frustrating, framework changes, it has never felt particularly fragmented. My impression is also, that it has changed a lot on Android. Personally, I also think that, in the beginning, many parts of iOS-development felt more modern than OSX, and that this was the platform where things were maturing faster. I would say, that mobile development is like development on most other platforms these days. You have an increasingly larger choice of languages, and the Mobile CPUs are certainly powerful enough that you can build very complex apps, where elegant code is an advantage. The challenge is to keep things simple from a user perspective. It really is (still) a wonderful domain to develop in, and I doubt there is more debugging or trial-and-error than any other platform! I worked for a company that embedded Linux on a custom device about 15 years ago. That was a horrible debugging, trial-and-error experience. The language was C. Chosen as a compromise because of the hardware specs, but not an obvious choice for the applications we built. Certainly not today. Most of the development team was frustrated with the development process, and I actually left the company before the product was put in production. So I think, I understand your line of thought, but I don't recognize it in today's mobile development.
dozzie 11y ago
Also, most of mobile development seems to be writing another UI for sensors or SQLite database, or sometimes another game like the plenty out there. Why would anybody think of that as exciting?
- V-2 11y ago
  Like your typical web app isn't yet another CRUD or CMS ;)

scottishfiction 11y ago

Totally agree with the approach. Relevant - http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing... Although perhaps 'Smart and Gets Things Done' is an over-simplification.

simi_ 11y ago
You might like this http://steve-yegge.blogspot.de/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-smart.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.de/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-...

Mapiarz 11y ago

What I have noticed in the first paragraph: "It seems that some schools have caught on and are teaching students the ins and outs of being a mobile developer but for the most part graduates seem to only have a course or two of mobile dev under their belt." Am I the only one who finds that weird? During my 5 years of college education in "informatics" I never had a 'programming for..." course. We were taught how to tackle problems, algorithmics, patterns and practices, formal languages, ai, distributed mechanisms and so on. We had to get that hard concrete experience on our own. IMHO having courses like "programming for Android" or "Web/JS programming" is a great way to mass produce monkey programmers.

rhinoceraptor 11y ago
> IMHO having courses like ... is a great way to mass produce monkey programmers. Definitely, I took a RoR elective and I wish there had been a Lisp/FP elective I could have taken. I'm pretty sure I only had one class where first class functions were even mentioned.
djent 11y ago
Worse yet, my college is offering a Mobile App Development class, under Computer Information Systems (as opposed to Computer Science, which I am in) which uses App Inventor. And they're charging $240 per credit for this 4 credit class!
alistairSH 11y ago
Totally agree with the "mass-produced monkey programmer" comment. I've seen it in practice, when interviewing new graduates. The grads from good (not necessarily great) schools tend to have solid fundamentals, and even without lots of "buzzword" coursework, they come out better. The grads from mediocre schools often have more buzzwords on their resume, but often lack solid fundamentals. Of course, that isn't written in stone. We have several great new hires from schools that are typical regional universities.
- mattmanser 11y ago
  The graduates from schools with higher entrance requirements have better graduates than the schools with lower ones? And you think it's their course material...

lordnacho 11y ago

Makes total sense. Once you've figured out how coding works, you can do any stack, any framework, any language. It bothers me how job ads tend to focus on various buzzwords. I'm quite sure you're better off hiring someone with good fundamentals who can learn your stack, rather than someone who is a novice but has some experience in the stack. I started off doing financial trading code in c++ / c#. It wasn't a huge leap doing Android and iOS. Principles are the same: - Some kind of OO. They are all pretty similar for most purposes. C++ is maybe a bit more intricate. Similarly, some kind of functional/lambda. - Some way to access a database. Plenty of ORMs or ways to do SQL if you need that. - Some GUI organisational principles. WinForms, WPF, Qt, Android, iOS, whatever. They tend to have things like "only draw on the main thread" and a pile of APIs for organising the screens, buttons, and so forth. But if you've done one, you're not going to need a course to do another. - StackOverflow will tell you everything that's pure translation. Things like {} dicts for python. - Get a brief tutorial for each new language/framework. They're all over the web, and the main point it just to highlight the features.

chrisseaton 11y ago
If you're hiring someone to do something like implement a new machine learning algorithm or a new compiler optimisation they're not to just pick that stuff up off of stack overflow are they? Sometimes you need specialist knowledge.
- workitout 11y ago
  If it's a new concept then the entropy is huge for anyone regardless of background.
  - chrisseaton 11y ago
    Do you really think any random programmer can master any given field of computer science in just a few months of starting a job? You could take a compiler engineer and get them doing cryptography, or a cryptographer and get them to write a compiler? No need for any experience to work in either of those fields? Just some JS or Android experience would be fine and you can use Stack Overflow to work out the rest of the details?

coldcode 11y ago

As long as someone understands the platform you can do this. I've seen way too much iOS code written by smart people new to iOS with no clue how to structure and ship a successful mobile app. This is likely true for most platforms. A smart developer can learn in time but usually you don't get that time so it's better if at least someone has done whatever it is before. I am sure I could master Android in time but if I started building an app on day 1 it would likely be terrible.

alistairSH 11y ago
The article addresses this. They have experienced developers on-hand to assist and ensure standards are maintained. Getting the time to learn is a management problem, not a developer problem. I've taught C# and the .Net framework to several teams over the last two years. The good developers pick it up without much problem. But, we usually start with several sprints of co-located group programming (for complete teams learning the stack).
- pconno3 11y ago
  Agreed, it's important to that the entire teams understands when someone is learning a new skill set or language. We try to allocate more time in our sprint for not only the developer who is learning but also for another developer on the team to help ramp them up. It takes a bit of working with the PM to determine what is a good task that isn't super time sensitive but it's typically a solvable problem.

seivan 11y ago

Mobile Devs might be better versed in the UI layer as they would be more familiar. Could end up not having to need a "photoshop-designer". We've used good developers on iOS projects, and while they would do ok with actual logic, they didn't do well when it came to Core Data or UIKit. It's not an education problem, but an interest issues. Most of them used Androids, the ones with iOS devices really didn't care much about UI. But I kinda agree with this in other aspects.

pconno3 11y ago
That's a valid point. Although, we hire developers who are interested in becoming mobile developers. If you want to succeed as an iOS developer, Core Data and UIKit are essential to learn. If the person isn't interested in doing the front end then mobile dev probably isn't for them. That should come up in the interview process.

JamesBaxter 11y ago

What I can't seem to teach my project manager is that the App Store review process takes as long as it takes and other app store restrictions.

koder2016 11y ago

It was a bit surreal to read, until I realised there are devs out there who never wrote any non-web front ends. > ...you’ll quickly learn that if you run all your DB queries on the main thread... When he says "mobile" he means "front-end". Front-end doesn't mean "HTML and JS".

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

jmbrook 11y ago

Small nit pick, but I would be worried about a mobile development place that thinks it has only been around 8 years, not heard of J2ME, Symbian and Windows CE etc? I do agree with the idea of hiring decent engineers and just training them, my only concern would be that without having had the mobile experience they might not know that they don't like it - it can be quite painful getting code to work nicely on a large collection of different hardware.

potatolicious 11y ago
That is a pretty small nitpick you've got there ;) It's a bit like saying "don't they know human flight existed before the Wright Bros." or "don't they know cars predate the Model T?" Of course, but the iPhone (and subsequently Android) presented a gigantic turning point in mobile development, to such a degree that mobile development can largely be categorized into "pre-iPhone" and "post-iPhone". Pre-iPhone mobile development was a vanishing small industry compared to today and used technologies that are largely completely not around today (see: J2ME, Symbian, Windows CE). So yeah, maybe they could've said "mobile development in the modern context centered around multitouch-centric interfaces using soft keyboards has only been around 8 years", but that's kind of a mouthful, and unless we're trying to write an accurate history of mobile software, not particularly relevant to anything.
- jmbrook 11y ago
  I would agree with the pre/post iPhone shift - but the likes of EA/Glu and other major games companies shifted an awful lot of apps pre iPhone. The big shift is that touch became the only game in town (along with all the associated dev wrinkles). Also the demise of all content aggregators meant we could just upload our apps to a store and keep 70% (prior to this we got ~20% i.e. operator took 60-70%, aggregator took 30% and we got 50/50 on that).
- jmbrook 11y ago
  I think a more accurate example is it like saying: "don't they know cars predate the Tesla" and given it is electric all prior cars don't matter. Just showing my age really :^)

rumcajz 11y ago

On the other hand, programmers jumping from one industry to another build no domain knowledge. The result is that domain experts, such as accountants or telecom technicians, specify the requirements, which then get translated 1:1 to software design, no diligence applied. The result is shitty software.

EvanPlaice 11y ago

How can I find a place like this to work. It seems like everybody sharing their interview experiences says they all use the same Google-wannabe standard. Ie whiteboarding, implementing an advanced data structure from memory, and rapidly solving CompSci homework questions. I'm no CompSci grad but I have pretty a pretty experience in many languages/stacks. I have confidence that I could design and implement a reasonably complex distributed architecture if requirements called for one. Yet I'd look like a complete asshole if asked to whiteboard a R/B tree from memory.

gedrap 11y ago
Fair enough. In my experience, "no one was ever fired for buying ibm" kind of thing is very strong in the interviewing. Why are you asking these meaningless questions, that don't give a chance to demonstrate any relevant knowledge? Everyone does that, duh.
- EvanPlaice 11y ago
  It's kind of sad that a person's worth can be reduced to such a useless metric. HR has no ability to objectively judge technical talent, so they follow the latest 'flavor of the month' interviewing strategy. The suits are heavily influenced by sources like Business Insider that repeatedly parrot advice about avoiding 'false positives at all cost.' Meanwhile the tech specialists who should step in and call BS, won't because they're to arrogant to admit their own hindsight bias. Ala judging new candidates based on their current level of ability and specialized knowledge rather than the level they were at when they were initially hired. It seems like the industry is dead set on forcing the perception that software development is hard science -- as in -- everything can and should be described in terms of fundamental data structures and algorithms. When the reality is, software development is 95% art and about 5% hard science. The vast majority of clever algorithms and data structures can be implemented in less than 100 lines of code each. What accounts for the other millions of lines of code in a system such as the Linux kernel? The world will never know...